A step passage strategy using environment recognition for an electric two-wheel wheelchair

Various situations can force people to rely on wheelchairs to be able to move. Despite the fact that cities are more and more aware of the difficulties that wheelchair users have to deal with and despite their increasing concern to provide them a friendlier environment, the gap between non-disabled people and disabled people still exists. To improve their quality of live, enhancements can also be done on the wheelchair itself. For example, electric wheelchairs reduce the required physical effort to move. But one of the trickiest situations are steps. They are omnipresent in cities and even if their rise height is small, they are still an obstacle. In this paper, a control method combining computer vision environment detection and modern control theory is proposed to achieve step-passage motion with a two-wheel wheelchair.